Pete McMartin: Race matters – is it racist to think so?

Onlookers watch as the 40th annual Chinese New Year parade makes its way along Vancouver’s West Pender Street on Sunday, February 17, 2013.

Photograph by: Ward Perrin
, PNG

“Hong Kong Chinese: NO ROOM HERE!” — sticker on an Apartment For Rent sign in the West End, 1990.

“A small but vocal group of Richmond seniors were despondent Monday after city council rejected their call for a bylaw quashing Chinese-only signage in a city where more than half the residents are of Chinese descent.” — Vancouver Sun, March 19, 2013.

In the front-page banner story of April 1, The Sun reported that projections in a study done for Citizenship and Immigration Canada showed that by 2031, whites will constitute a visible minority in Metro Vancouver.

What was remarkable about this story wasn’t so much about what happened next, but what didn’t.

Nothing happened. We had just reported a study predicting a tectonic shift not only in the city’s racial make-up, but very likely in the city’s cultural trajectory, and the story came and went without a peep.

No media outlets that I read or heard commented on it. The modest amount of mail we did receive in response to the story — some of which will run in Monday’s paper — took us to task for using the term “white” or for categorizing people in terms of colour. Some criticized the paper for thinking that it was news at all.

If any lips did quiver at the story, it was at the privacy of the breakfast table over the day’s first cup of coffee. To admit publicly to having any qualms about such news — to admit to having any feeling about it at all in public — would be to expose oneself to the charge of racism. It’s a charge that has a terrific dampening effect — and it should, if the charge is warranted.

But it also discourages a frank and open discussion about race and the ways in which many of us negotiate that reality. Public censure may cow the most vocal of racist sentiment, which in its most virulent form is rare in Metro Vancouver, anyway, but it doesn’t stop resentment, which is much more widespread.

The rapidity of the change in Metro’s racial make-up has been breathtaking, and speaks to the tolerance and liberality of the culture here.

In a sense, the idea that whites may find themselves a visible minority within two decades isn’t news, it’s an eventuality the city has been hurtling toward for some time. All the study did was give it a date. I’m sure a lot of us thought that whites were already a visible minority in Metro Vancouver. And like, so?

And all of that immense change, which in the past would have been accomplished by war or famine or mass migration, was accommodated peaceably. This says a lot about the city. It would be hard to identify a place less racist.

On the other hand, change is hard, and it’s not unnatural for established residents to resent that change, whether it’s seeing a neighbourhood completely transformed by teardowns or being unable to read a business sign in the official language of the community you have lived in all your life.

So, while a story on the complete racial makeover of Metro Vancouver attracts little commentary, a more symptomatic story like the furor over Chinese-only signs in Richmond attracts national media attention.

It’s a case, I think, of picking a small fight to illuminate a bigger battle — of a city struggling to come to terms with the difference between race and racism, and between the pull of tribalism and the ideals of multiculturalism.

Clearly, in the case of Richmond, there are Chinese businesses that could care less if they were patronized by whites. Their Chinese-only signs say as much. And what a turnabout that is: When once there were signs in English warning Chinese to stay away, two decades later there are Chinese signs wanting nothing to do with English.

I happen to think this is stupid and offensive, but I think a lot of things are stupid and offensive, and I agree with the Richmond council’s decision not to enact a bylaw banning Chinese-only signage law, as some 1,000 petitioners wished it to do. It isn’t the city’s place to legislate free expression.

But the city might do well to ask itself what those Chinese-only signs express. Is it a desire to limit one’s market on the basis of language and culture, or are they racist? Will time and the market eventually do away with such signs or will a critical mass of Chinese in large, self-ghettoizing communities encourage more of the same?

Oddly, the one Richmond councillor who agreed the petitioners might have a point was himself Chinese, Chak Au, a former immigrant from Hong Kong.

“I think actually what we have to do,” he said, during council, “is improve intercultural relationships. And in order to improve that we need to have dialogue and discussions.”

Those discussions are more than about signs, of course. They’re about the tension between race and multiculturalism, and whether or not the two are compatible.

Unfortunately, it’s just not a conversation we’re willing to have yet, except under our breath.

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